metroidfandomcom-20200222-history
User blog:RAN1/Wikia Fail
Well, these last couple of days have been host to some rather strange great new features. For example, the Monaco skin won't render properly in browsers like Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer, making all sorts of stuff look weird (especially diffs; admins, be wary of this; if you must, use the Monobook skin temporarily by appending ?useskin=monobook to the end of the diff URL). Another update is the fact that we have ceased to , and on Wikia too! And as if that weren't enough, Wikia's central main page's auto-update function for updating every box you see there has went down as well, supposedly something to do with the purge function, since you can manually purge the page by clicking here. I'm assuming this "update's" gone Wikia-wide, so don't be surprised if templates act as if they're never going to be updated on the pages they're on. Post comments below if you find any more bugs; in the meantime, I'm poking Wikia Staff as to how they managed to roll out this "new version" of MediaWiki. Update (on 19:25, April 7, 2010 (UTC)): Looks like everything that's been happening recently is a result of Wikia updating the caching set-up. Updating the cache is very important for MediaWiki because it, er, keeps things updated. That said, their cache system came in with some rather horrific side effects; that is, the cache will no longer update. Be aware of this as you browse the wiki, and keep in mind that you can re-cache (better known by it's formal name of "purging") by adding ?action=purge to the end of the URL, but if you see something like metroid.wikia.com/index.php?title=…, add &action=purge instead. This should manually purge stuff that normally could be, but be aware that special pages cannot be re-cached manually. Until Wikia fixes whatever bugs caused this dilemma, don't rely on the Special page lists quite too much. They'll be out-of-date for quite some time now. That also goes for the skin rendering, so be wary, those of you using Firefox and Internet Explorer. The diffs will look largely terrible in Monaco, so try using the Monobook skin instead (same as purging, but replace action=purge with useskin=monobook). Hope this solves all (or at least most) of your problems. Update (on 17:10, April 22, 2010 (UTC)): Ok, so I went on #wikia on the IRC to see if there's ever going to be a permanent fix to this problem. Now, I go there, and I learn that "Wikia always has caching problems." I didn't get any other response, and I don't think I will. So much for Wikia having a bug-free skin. This is because they've modified MediaWiki so that the skin goes through another cache instead of letting the browser cache stuff, which is quite ridiculous in my opinion. On the other hand, in the Misc section of your prefs, there is a checkbox to disable page caching. Click it and save the prefs, refresh your cache, then re-enable the page caching in the prefs and save them again. That should solve the cache issues (at least until the next time Wikia cache fails strike again). Update (on 17:04, April 24, 2010 (UTC)): Ok, so I take a look at what's been going on in Firefox since this was taking too long for Wikia to fix. By using Firebug. I see that the last code it recognized was the Main Page box coding. I take a look at the code, and in the section for WebKit based browsers (that is, Apple Safari and Google Chrome), there was one (") before the styling for the main page box header ended. That shouldn't have been there in the first place, so I take that out and hard-refresh…And every single fail that I described for our skin undid itself. It turns out that by adding a single quotation mark in the wrong place to our Monaco skin file that you can break the rest of the CSS file (which turned out to be half of the whole thing) for every other browser except Apple Safari and Google Chrome. :P. Apologies for any trouble I caused you all. Hard-refreshing should clear your browser of every fail that's happened since April 5th. Remind me to be wary of where I put my quotation marks.